Straining to move, Sigmund raised his left hand and pried the fingers of his right open one by one. Threat turned to condescending pity when the officer realized what was happening, remarking “Some sort of paralytic sickness from mucking about in the zone, huh?” as he turned the key to the left, waiting for the machine to go silent before turning it to the right again. 

“Alright, grab the handle again. You Ikesians never know where to stop, that’s how you get these bizarre conditions…” he continued thinking aloud, waiting for Sigmund to do as he asked before pressing the buttons again, waiting for the Fog to form words once again, without any enthusiasm this time. 

NO CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND

“Figures…” muttered the officer, unsurprised by the outcome. He had assumed the malfunction caused a false readout, and he was correct. “Step away from the machine before you seize up again,” he added as he turned and took a seat at his desk again, once more retrieving a paper from one of the drawers and the pen from his coat.

“Reason for entry?” 

“Search for employment and medical treatment,” Sigmund replied in a clearly rehearsed manner.

The officer wrote something on the paper and filed it away. He dismissively gestured for the bearded man to step away, which he did, walking to the door and leaning up against the wall. 

“Next!” barked the mustachioed man, his tired eyes locking onto Zefaris. “Blonde with the homunculus eye!” 

As much as he ogled her eye, the officer didn’t act as hostile towards Zefaris. He did the same things he had done for the previous two, operating the machine with a semblance of resignation as if he had realized that truly, these people weren’t war criminals. The machine returned the expected result.

NO CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND

The self-same sequence of events unfolded, beat by beat. The officer gestured for her to step away from the machine, sat at his desk, retrieved one of the papers alongside his pen, and looked up at Zefaris. 

“Reason for entry?”

“Employment.”

“Markswoman, huh? I find homunculus eyes to be a crutch for lack of real skill, but no helping it if you lost the real thing. Couldn’t afford a second one?”

Zefaris let out a dark, melancholic chuckle as she answered, “One put me deep enough in the hole.”

“Count yourself lucky, then. Your debt is probably no more than the price of new shoes, what with the recent surge of inflation,” laughed the officer in a mocking tone, directing his mockery towards the country more than the person before him.  The humor faded from his being in seconds, and he sharply gestured for Zefaris to step aside, staring through Makhus with a gaze as sharp as a razor.

“Next.”

“One moment, please,” Zefaris said, grabbing the officer’s attention once more. “What do you mean by inflation?”

He raised an eyebrow, turning a somewhat self-satisfied gaze towards the markswoman. “Oh, haven’t you heard?” he asked rhetorically, smugness dripping from every word. “The central bank tried to just print all the money necessary to pay war reparations. Someone high-up put a stop to it rather early on, but it still devalued the hell out of the Ikesian Mark. You must’ve been in the E.Z. for a while if you don’t know that. Now, if you would...”

A gesture for her to step away, turning to one of beckoning towards Makhus. Both of them obeyed the implicit order, the bottles of Liquid Vigor that hung from his backpack clattering as the swordsman walked. For the fourth time, a nearly-identical sequence of events unfolded - from the moment the officer stood from his desk, to the moment he sat back down, retrieved the form and his pen, and asked the fateful question.

“Reason for entry?” the officer asked, leaning around to get a look at the seal-bottles.

“Self-employment,” Makhus shot back, his tone harsh and hard, but controlled.

“As a…”

“An alchemist.”

A raised eyebrow again. “Conventionally trained?” he inquired.

Makhus squinted. He thought the officer was trying to leverage reverse psychology to make him say the opposite, to justify confiscating the seal-bottles. A part of him wanted just that to happen to justify his spite towards Grekuria as a country, and so he answered honestly.

“Self-taught.”

Somehow, the officer didn’t seem happy about that answer. In fact, he sighed, hesitating before he asked, “You know I’m supposed to confiscate your essentia containers if you’re not properly trained, right?”

The swordsman only gave a stern nod, staring holes through the man’s bag-riddled eyes.

“Just hand over one of the smaller bottles and I’ll let you pass. I objected to the order, so I got stationed here by some jackoff baron’s kid whose daddy bought him the way to a higher rank than mine...” he began, ranting about the petty unfairness of military hierarchy as he lightly knocked on his desk to signify where to place the bottle. 

The officer stopped halfway through his rant, sniffing the air. Zelsys smelled it too. She felt it, the same feeling she had attributed to Zefaris’s gaze during the trek here, the same feeling she had when she first woke in that marble place. It seemed like the others had noticed the sudden shift in atmosphere as well, with Zefaris and Sigmund both cautiously looking around and Makhus frozen halfway through untying the knot around the neck of a half empty seal-bottle.

“Do you smell that?” the officer asked no-one in particular.

Zelsys knew that smell intimately and immediately answered, “Nigredo.”

“Just… Just a moment,” said the man, nearly leaping from his seat as he rushed to the door and cracked it open, peering out. The room immediately filled with the stench of rot, of death, of choking smoke. Black Fog began to creep in through the crack in the door and the officer visibly recoiled, slamming the door shut.

All smugness and authority had vanished from his face at that moment, replaced by an expression any soldier was familiar with. Fear for one’s life barely concealed by the calculating determination that stemmed from extensive training. The four of them shared a look, and assuming he would listen more readily to a non-Ikesian, Zelsys piped up. “A rot-bear?” she queried. Much to her surprise, the officer frantically shook his head.